ROMAN Catholic voters in Scotland abandoned their traditional support for the Labour party and switched to the SNP in large numbers in last week’s General Election, with almost half of Catholics voting for the party that took 56 of Scotland’s 59 seats.

The respected Catholic publication The Tablet, which celebrates its 175th anniversary this year, yesterday published the results of a YouGov survey which it commissioned in the run-up to the election.

The poll showed that 48 per cent of Catholics in Scotland who had stated their intention said they were planning to vote for the SNP, compared with 38 per cent for Labour.

The result was hailed by leading Scottish historian Sir Tom Devine as showing that “when Catholics became mainstream, they behaved like other mainstream Scots and reacted the same way as people in other areas of the ‘Labour empire’ to the general reasons for the decline of Labour.”

The YouGov survey contained a more general poll of members of all faiths and, among those in Scotland who said they regarded themselves as religious, 34 per cent said they would vote SNP, compared with 32 per cent for Labour and 22 per cent for the Conservatives.

In Britain as a whole, Catholic support for the Labour Party has waned between 2005 and 2015.

The Tablet said that of the poll sample of 1,260 people who identified themselves as Catholic, some 41 per cent said they planned to vote Labour against 31 per cent Conservative. In 2005, a Tablet-commissioned opinion poll showed that 53 per cent of Catholics were Labour supporters.

Devine commented that the SNP has “very cunningly and effectively” stolen the left-wing ideological clothes of Labour, and “decades ago” had targeted the Labour-dominated constituencies in western Scotland with a substantial Catholic minority.

Devine said: “Back in the 1960s, the SNP was a toxic brand for Catholics, who regarded it as a Protestant party and believed that even minor devolution would simply mean a strengthening of Kirk or Protestant power.”

The Thatcher years saw attitudes start to change and by the 1990s the SNP had started to seek support from Catholic voters.

Devine told The Tablet: “They became very strong supporters of things like the denominational education system and courted people like Cardinal Thomas Winning [Archbishop of Glasgow from 1974 to 2001] who became quite close to Alex Salmond. In due course, Winning actually stated that he was quite comfortable with Scottish nationalism.”

Devine also told The Tablet that, at the same time, the Catholic community was evolving from a disadvantaged group to mainstream Scottish society.

He said: “The old fear about sectarianism had gone and integration had taken place. So, when Catholics became mainstream, they behaved like other mainstream Scots and reacted the same way as people in other areas of the ‘Labour empire’ to the general reasons for the decline of Labour.”

Perhaps most tellingly for psephologists and pundits alike, Devine pointed to the demographics of the Catholic community. The average age of Church of Scotland members is over 50, and that age group was repeatedly shown to be against independence or more devolution, while Catholics belong to a wider age group, with many adherents aged from their twenties to early forties — the core age group of independence supporters.

The Scottish Catholic Media Office would not comment on the poll, but revealed that the Catholic bishops are writing to all 59 Scottish MPs seeking to work with them in the future.

Before the election, the bishops issued a pastoral letter to all 500 parishes in Scotland saying that “the first consideration for any economic policy should be the dignity of the person, not the pursuit of profit”, before adding: “Nuclear weapons represent a grave threat to the human family.”